Category Archives: TV

Marvel super hero Luke Cage’s worst nemesis turned out to be technology today, as Netflix servers went down for over two hours. This interruption comes one day after the third Marvel series on the streaming service debuted its thirteen episode first

While Netflix did not respond to requests for comment and the streaming service does not reveal viewing statistics, speculation online for the disruption was laid at the feet of the popularity of Marvel’s Luke Cage this weekend.

In 1984 an incredibly astute Steve Jobs wanted a commercial that would set Apple apart from its competitors. His solution was to spend a then astonishing $900,000 on a short film that would encapsulate just how different the company was from any others in Tech or any other business.

He hired a director who certainly had vision, having created Alien and Blade Runner and basically let him free to create something totally new in the world of TV advertising, a one minute mega budget Sci Fi movie.

Strange as it seems now, the board of directors at Apple hated the finished product, it was Jobs and Wozniak who basically demanded that it be used, even offering to pay for it to be aired during the Superbowl.

To this day many people in the advertising industry consider this to be the greatest advert ever made

The Advert

Ridley Scott talks about how he made the ‘best advert ever’

And if younger readers do not understand how different this advert was here is what Bill Gates was putting out at the same time

It seems almost everyone who knows of Emilia Clarke – and that’s everyone who watches Game of Thrones and a whole lot who don’t – know her as the exiled, haughty blonde queen ‘across the Narrow Sea’, Daenerys Targaryen.

The HBO series has caught on like the proverbial house on fire, and she’s now a familiar face and figure with her own persona that’s an integral part of the ongoing story. There’s more to her story, however, than Game of Thrones.

It may be a bit of a stretch to claim a three-year-old was seized by a ‘passion’ for acting but that’s the report about Emilia Clarke. Her father’s job as a theatre sound engineer had him working backstage at a production of Show Boat, Emilia’s Mum took her to see it and the rest is history – in the making, as it were. In fact, a good bit of childish exuberance comes through both in her acting roles and in her interviews; it’s part of what makes her so appealing to so many fans.

Emilia’s birthplace was in London, on October 23, 1986, but the family including her older brother moved to the Berkshire countryside and she attended St. Edward’s School of Oxford from 2000 to 2005. She had her first acting roles in two plays produced at that school, then went on to the Drama Centre London, a well-regarded institution where she got ten more stage roles under her belt and onto her resume.

During that time she also participated in a short ‘student’ film where her budding abilities were quite obvious. In that film she was a teenager in a turbulent relationship with a married man, and she’s very, very believable. She’s also impressive in two 2009 guest appearances on Doctors, the BBC drama, in which she plays a rebellious teenager called Saskia defying a protective Dad, both of them fixated on the girl’s mother who abandoned them when Saskia was ten years old.

Her first full-length film, in 2010, was a made-for-TV science fantasy flick called Triassic Attack, (or was it Jurassic?) and it was not what she would call a winner. Emilia played the part of a rebellious teenager again, this time in a small American town where a native Indian tribe’s ancient lands are about to be desecrated and a lot of dinosaur bones get animated to drive away the intruders. Emilia got better reviews than the film did, and she figures it was good experience (especially since she got to spend time in Bavaria for the filming.)

Emilia has a talent for drama, no question about that. In 2013 she starred as Holly Golightly in Richard Greenburg’s adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The play ran at the Cort Theatre on Broadway and co-starred Cory Michael Smith. It got mixed but generally poor reviews, mostly due to its somber atmosphere as opposed to the lighter version popularized by Audrey Hepburn in 1961.

However as compensation the audience was treated to a vision of Emilia and Cory Michael in a bathtub with only a few bubbles in the way of costume. Critics called the baring of bodies ‘unnecessary’ and some professed shock that the British actress seemed to have no qualms. Others pointed out that a lot more skin was shown in episodes of Game of Thrones, and Emilia agreed – she wasn’t worried at all.

So it’s unsurprising that when she filmed Terminator: Genisys in 2015 with Arnold Schwarzenegger and had to get mostly naked again, she had no problem with that either. Fifth in the Terminator saga, Genisys stars Emilia as Sarah Connor alongside Schwarzenegger, Jai Courtney and Jason Clarke (no relation). Much has been made of the movie’s advertising poster that featured a close-up view of Emilia’s posterior: she told reporters that the shot was taken without her knowledge, but she considers it a compliment, so no worries.

Reviewers were not terribly kind to the film’s plot, but gave credit to the actors overall. Talking about making the movie, Emilia commented that the worst parts were trying to drive the Brink’s Truck and learning to handle heavy weapons (shooting at adversaries “over and over and over” on re-takes). As for the more romantic scenes, “Naked in a harness was fun – doing stunts, that was good. That was interesting.”

Certainly her experience on Thrones gives her an edge, since she’s been playing the super-tough Daenerys for six seasons or more than five years now. What with dragons and other fearsome perils in most every episode, Emilia has to stay on her toes and in top shape, which she appears to be doing quite well indeed.

Still, this energetic and enthusiastic young actress has taken on other projects as well. Me Before You was released in June of this year; plot-wise it’s about as far from terminators and thrones as one can get.

In this one Emilia gets a chance to be more of what she thinks of as her ‘real self’ – a bubbly optimistic young woman who takes on the care of a quadriplegic played by Sam Claflin.

Sam, as William Traynor, is a wealthy young daredevil whose motorcycle accident leaves him paralyzed and deeply embittered. Louisa Clark (Emilia) is a small town English girl who’s looking for a way to help her much less than wealthy family. “Lou felt like such a perfect extension of me,” said Emilia of her role. Far from the kick butt persona she’s perfected as Daenerys, Louisa is innocently cheerful and upbeat – and of course eventually she persuades Sam to share at least some of her optimism.

Emilia Clarke is a fairly complex person at her current age of almost-thirty; she’s the girl next door – and she was voted “Sexiest Woman in the World” by Esquire Magazine last year (2015). She’s the Mother of Dragons and keeps getting nominated for Emmys for that role – and she’s seldom recognized on the street without the long blond wig that defines Daenerys. If you watch her interviews, she’s funny and self-effacing and full of herself all at the same time.

It appears that Miss Clarke has plenty of options in her future, and it will be fun to see what she gets up to next. From latest reports, it will not be another Terminator role, but it will be another season of Thrones, and she told Glamour Magazine that if she had her way, Daenerys will end up Queen of the whole shebang -she and her three Dragons. It may well come to pass.

Humans is the most successful drama to premier on Channel 4 UK in two decades, and soon it is going to be back for its second season. The new series has eight new episodes that will further explore the growing divide between the Synths and the humans that created them (and bought them).

The real strength of this series compared to other similar movies and TV shows is that it gets down to the real social elements of what it may be like when robots live in our homes.

For example would a child come to love its robot nanny as much or more than its somewhat absent mother? If you have sex with a robot is that ‘cheating’ in the traditional sense? What social problems will spring up when what is basically a new ‘species’ lives in our own homes.

For those who don’t remember last season, a quick wrap up should do the trick. During the finale Elster’s children are finally able to unlock the consciousness of a Synth, but Niska deletes the code and pops it onto a flash drive. When the episode closed it was unclear who had the real copy of the code and what was going to happen.

This season almost every character is back for the 2016 series. There are a few surprises such as the appearance of Will Tudor who appears to be dead, but things will take a twist in the second season. While Neil Maskell is coming back as DS Peter Drummond, it is not confirmed yet whether Jill Halfpenny who plays his wife on screen and Danny Webb who played Edwin Hobb has come back yet.

William Hurt will not be back this season given his character died at the end of the first series and unlike In Real Humans, the writers from Humans have stated viewers should not expect to see their show take the same path. There is no reason to fear however, as several new members will be joining the cast including Marshall Allman from Prison Break and Carrie-Anne Moss from Jessica Jones

While viewers are going to have to tune in to see exactly what happens, there are a few spoilers floating around about season three. It is known that Niska is at large and has the flash drive which contains the code.

New ‘Stealth’ Trailer

Her synth family are each attempting to find a place to exist within the world and have no idea where she is. Meanwhile, Laura and Joe are working on repairing their marriage

However, soon unconfirmed reports start to surface about synths behaving in odd ways and the ripple effect leads to the past ending up on the doorstep of the Hawkins house. The Hawkins family, primarily including Joe and Laura will be forced to make a decision that will place them under the spotlight. While all of this is happening, the synths and humans are starting to reevaluate what it means to really be considered intelligent life and the narrative questions who really gets to decide what constitutes being alive.

A couple of TV seasons ago, HBO dealt with a huge leak of its popular series, Game of Thrones. The move prompted the network to button up and stop releasing press screeners before the episodes hit the schedule. However, now one Game of Thrones actor has accused the subscription cable network of leaking the episodes on purpose as part of a ploy to keep fans interested in the fantasy series. Here’s what Alexander Siddig, who played Prince Doran on the hit series, had to say in a recent interview:

The more secretive it is, the more special it is. And certainly Game of Thrones plays that. They misinform the crowd and they give them tidbits to send them in wrong directions. So, for example, last season, I believe that the first few episodes were stolen and downloaded online, and everybody got to see them before the show actually aired, and everybody was furious at HBO and whatnot. I don’t know if you remember. I am almost positive that those four episodes were leaked by HBO themselves. So there is an enormous amount of spin going on.

At the time, when the four episodes from Season 5 were leaked, HBO was adamant that the leak came from a press screener that was mailed out. That DVD screener then found its way onto the Internet, although the episodes were fairly low quality compared to the HD that most viewers are used to. However, Alexander Siddig told Startrek.com that he really believes HBO was responsible for the leak and then made sure a big deal was made of the leak after it happened, presumably to keep buzz up for the new episodes of the series.